a journey through [the bizarre world of] gestational surrogacy

Tag: support group

Forgive this beginning. It’s a little rough. I planned on using part of this in a different format and couldn’t bare to change it. So I added and reworked it for this. I will eventually put it in its intended place on a support group at Inspire through Resolve. Only because I had already started writing it down was it even feasible to consider finishing it…which of course turned into (ahem!) thebeginning of a whole series. I couldn’t get it all out in time for this amazing syncroblog book launch. This started as a plea from my soul for my current dark place: infertility. It is hardly the only dark place in my life, but it is the one where I spend the most time these days. When I learned about the Night Drivingsyncroblog for Addie’s new book launch; I instantly knew this writing needed to morph into the beginning of something very different.

Now, bear with me for a few moments as I do a quick unsolicited plug for Addie and her amazing new book Night Driving. Read it. It will be amazing. I’m sure! It’s impossible for me to explain in any other way: I’m madly in love awe with this woman!! I have a huge writer crush on her and maybe a little bit want to be her. (Addie, do forgive me for making it public like this! It’s just that everyone should know really – it’s been almost twomonths!) All jokes aside, as a writer I have so much love and respect for Addie. I identify intensely with her words. As I’ve read them I often find myself exclaiming that I could have penned them! I think this is partly because I am a writer. I think it is partly because I am on a very similar path of trying to untangle my own upbringing through the Evangelical webs she writes about so candidly in her first book. I think it is partly because I also struggle with Depression. Currently, I am inhaling her words like deep breaths. Every. Single. One. I’ve read many of her recent blogs and am slowly making my way through When We Were On Fire. With ever chapter, I am finding myself simultaneously angry (that I didn’t know about it two years ago) and overjoyed (because it has come in the “now” to encourage and prompt me forward at just.the.right.time). I didn’t even know Addie was alive until the end of January. Her bravery and candor have helped me – in so many ways – over the last (almost) two months. I feel more free in my own skin than I may have at any point in my life. It feels like her words have given my not-so-Brave-Soul enough courage to stop running around in the circles of the darkness of my own heart and finally just speak out. Into the darkness. Without expectation of finding light. That hasn’t been an option for me previously. I’m ridiculously excited to have this outlet for my story. I am without doubt that the timing of this has all been written by the Divine. While I know full well that Addie didn’t intend it so, it feels very much like this synrochoblg was designed specifically for me. It is the very push I needed to finally tell the story people have spent most of my life trying to convince me to write.

So grab a flashlight (if you need one) and join me, Brave Souls. The lights are about to go out.

The Intersection of Faith and Family Building: Part One

On Why I Need a Support Group

There’s a game we used to play in college called “I Have Never.” Until now I could have answered “I have never…joined a support group.” I’ve come to the point where I can no longer journey on this crazy road of infertility (IF) “alone.” I’m not alone, I know. Not really. My life is full of supportive people. I am blessed beyond measure with amazing family, friends, and framily (new word, you do the math!). I have so many people. I love all my people. It’s a pretty incredible thing to be able to say that even two and a half years into our IF journey, people I currently know and trust have filled my need for a supportive community. I am thankful for the myriad of blessings that last statement represents. Another key person in my support network is an amazing therapist. She entered stage left when my shit really hit the fan when I was a young teenager; dealing with the heartbreak of losing my first love. I was kind of forced there by my loving parents after threatening to end my life at the end of my 10-month-long first relationship. I tend toward dramatic, not gonna lie. But really, it crushed me then. It was a brilliant move on the part of my parents to drag 15-year-old me there that night to her office in my brown suede jacket. Since then, I have been able to see my therapist on a regular basis throughout every pitch black corner my life has been bent around. These days I drive 1.5 hours to get to her office at least every 3 months (often more). She truly is invaluable.

I know – I have always known – that support groups are available. I have recommended support groups to other people. I even have some training in how to run support groups from the brief time I spent in an MSW program. I just didn’t think I ever belonged in one. Or, maybe worse, I didn’t think I needed one.

I’ve had a very messed up view of support groups. (I have a very messed up view of a lot of things…). It’s safe to summarize though that I’ve never liked them much. While not always true, I’ve found support groups to be darker places than I can handle. Then again, I’ve never invested very much time trying to really belong to one. My past very minimal experience with them however, convinced me I needed to stay very far from what ever was happening in these groups. Now, I see it as a self-protective reaction to my narrow access of experiences. There was just too much darkness there for my naive and sheltered heart. My heart which only knew how to search one very narrow path to the Light; get out of the darkness as fast as possible. Go Into the Light. Finally, through many years of defining, losing, and then re-defining my faith, I think have found a doorway to enter into the darkness where I find my faithful and constantly broken heart. Support groups, at least one of them, will be very different for me now.

When considering a Third Party Reproduction option as the path to parenthood it doesn’t feel lonely but the opposite; I think it feels over-crowded. So many nights I wish it could just be him & me and a bottle of wine, like it is for normalregular fertile people. It can’t be like that for us though. So while we travel this path where it is leading us, even though we have a wonderful village surrounding us, I think I need to find a different village. I need a village on a journey that looks more like mine. Because when it comes down to it, I can talk to my my partner, my fertile friends, my family, my very amazing therapist, and every Target cashier from IL to Texas, all.day.long; at the end of the day I still wind up feeling alone and isolated. WITHOUT. Without a baby. Without the ability to conceive. Without anyone who really gets this place of failure and isolation I feel so deeply today.

Truth is though, I’m not sure I really even belong here. These IF support group boards are so full of people talking about cycles and embryos and transfers – successful or otherwise. Reading them makes me feel like a misfit toy. I have spots on my face, my buttons are sewn on sideways with the holes to fasten them together just out of my reach of my stubby little fingers.

One of the reasons I’ve stayed away from this space – support groups – is that I fear I will still feel alone after I reach out and make myself vulnerable. I’m praying I’m wrong. I’m hoping that my desire to enter into a village of people whose heartbeats resound in empty spaces instead of in screams of the children is met with similarly spotted faces. Writing this I know that even if I don’t find that here, even if I am the misfit of the all the misfits, part of me needs this step to move forward – to level up and begin the next phase of this amazing story that I’m in charge of writing.

Of course, if you know me you, you understand that to the best of my ability, I have sought to write my story only with the guidance and grace of the Great God of the universe. When He created this whole insane universe, vast and complex as we know it to be today, I have faith in this: surely He didn’t create my life outside His grasp of the very complicated things.
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My blog is singularly focused on this relatively new Team Dream Baby journey. I don’t talk too much about my faith here. That’s been very much on purpose. Truth is, our TDB journey has been a HUGE part of the restoration of my faith. I have been processing in other places because of the controversial nature of how we are choosing to build our family. The use of the word ‘surrogacy’ causes a lot of waves in the faith-based communities of my youth. Really, surrogacy is just pretty controversial anywhere. [Challenge: Bring up ‘gestational surrogacy’ (use our story if you can’t find another reason) next time you’re anywhere just for kicks and comment on the questions that follow! That would be a really fun exercise!]

For those of you who don’t know me pre-TDB, there is a lot about my life that isn’t on the pages of this blog. It couldn’t live here at first. The rest of my life and this new crazy amazing adventure needed to be separate. They aren’t separate though and I’m kind of tired of forcing my faith apart from my future family. It’s exhausting. So I’m getting ready to run the giant flashing red light at the intersection of Faith & Family Building. I’m gonna cause a huge crash, and we’re gonna need a lot of Brave Souls to join the rescue crew.
If you do know me, you know that my faith has always – even when I lost it completely – driven my life. My faith is my compass, albeit the magnet a little loose. No matter which direction it points me, I always find my way Home. To the God who created me just as I am. Our future child is not where I place my faith, but the dream of him (or her) in my arms forces me to refine my faith even when it’s scary as hell and I’d rather just flush it all down a drain.
I focus on happy and hopeful things on the blog a lot. When you’re asking people to fund your dream, as we are, I don’t think it’s ‘smart marketing’ to be a negative nelly. I’ve learned so many new things on this path. For example how to self-host a blog, what a “synchroblog” even is! (I am ever evolving and learning this blogging stuff as I go. Thanks for the patience as I put it all together so slowly. Really, so BRAVE!) I’ve learned so much about Family Building options I never knew. I have woken a passion for the infertility community that I hope to expand upon in days and years to come. It’s been one of the best times of my life. It’s also been one of the most difficult and darkest places I’ve ever traveled. In a lot of ways though, I’m thriving in ways I never thought possible. I cannot genuinely tribute the hope and light I’ve found on this journey without describing more of the darkness of my life.

Please stay tuned for

The Intersection of Faith and Family Building: Part Two

My Life of Chronic Pain

Preview:

“… Sixteen years into our relationship, my neurologist continues to shake his head at me and call me an enigma in our regular appointments. He’s basically been doing that since the day we met. I baffle really well trained intelligent medical professionals on regular basis. Sometimes I joke that part of my purpose in life is so they don’t get big heads and think they have all the answers. Though it’s a joke mostly, there is a space in my heart where – having baffled teams of doctors at The Mayo Clinic and several University Hospitals and all.the.specialists I see – it also feels like a real genuine part of why I’m here. I’ve made peace with it over the years but it wasn’t always so easy to joke about it.

In 1994 at what was then, Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago (Now Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital Chicago), two days before my 14th birthday, I was spun into a tornado of testing that plopped me quite roughly in a very big (and equally vague) autoimmune disease bucket. …”